More traffic for your blog with the follow button

After weeks of experimentation with different designs, locations and names, we’ve determined the addition of a small, cute, little button at the bottom of your blog will dramatically help pageviews and retention.

Starting today, on all blogs, whenever someone who is not logged into WordPress.com visits, they’ll see this small little button in the bottom right corner. The button is mostly out of the way, but just noticeable enough before people leave.

And when a visitor clicks on the button, it smoothly slides open, revealing a simple way to follow the blog without having the burden of checking back on their own to see if there’s anything new. They can put their email address in, and will be notified whenever your blog has a new post.

Questions we expect to be frequently asked:

1. Why is it called Follow and not Subscribe? Good question, as many designers here at WordPress.com debated this, including me. Although the functionality is similiar to the Email subscription widget, after testing various prototypes, we learned more people clicked on the button and signed up if it were called Follow rather than Subscribe. We also know subscribe suggests to some its something you pay for, whereas follow has no such connotation.

2. I don’t like it. How can I turn it off on my blog? Easy. Go to your Dashboard. Click on Settings, then Reading, then Email. Sorry you don’t like it – but we understand. If you change your mind, this is also the place to go to customize the message new followers (subscribers) will see.

3. Will other subscription features also have their name changed? We are carefully studying the impact of different names on existing features. We only change names when we have evidence it helps our bloggers and the benefits outweigh the annoyance of the change. We don’t change feature names to be fashionable or to emulate other services that might rhyme with “critter” or “shmacebook”.

4. Why don’t I see the button? The follow button only appears for users not logged in to WordPress.com. If you want to follow a WordPress.com blog, and are already logged in, simply use the follow button that already appears in your admin bar at the top of the screen. If you want to see the new hotness, log out of WordPress.com and go to any blog, including your own, to see it. To log out, go to your admin bar at top of the screen. Click on “Me”, then click on “Log Out”.

5. Why did you put something on my blog that changes how it looks? We know you want complete control over your blog’s appearance, and that’s why we’ve built so many themes, widgets and customizations for you to use. But here the data was strong enough for the positive effect of this small little button to turn it on. We’re making sure you know about it and know how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it. In the future we expect to add more ways for visitors to follow your blog, which will give visitors and bloggers more of what they want.

Email Newsletter

Missing out on the latest WordPress.com developments? Enter your email below to receive future announcements direct to your inbox. An email confirmation will be sent before you will start receiving notifications - please check your spam folder if you don't receive this.

I’m grateful that you have put this icon on my blog so that if I like it, there’s nothing more I have to do. I do like it, but if I didn’t, I have the option, as you point out, of undoing instead. It’s a lot easier that way. At least for me.
Thank you.

It’s just what the doctor ordered. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s way down at the bottom and easily overlooked. Your next mission, if at all possible, is to give us the ability to move it to a more prominent spot so we can eliminate the Subscribe widget, which will then be redundant.

I like the idea and I like that it’s small and unobtrusive and I really like that there is a way to disable it, but it would be nice if the text of the popup could be customized a la the Email Subscription widget.

Thanks for the feedback. We’ll keep it in mind. As mentioned on another comment, we’re unlikely to change the name of a command or term that is used throughout WordPress.com (Comment, Dashboard, etc.).

You can view your list of followers/subscribers by going to Dashboard, Site Stats, and scrolling down to Totals, Subscriptions and Shares. If you click where it says active subscribers you’ll see the entire list.

Thank you for all you do to make our blogs the best on the Internet! Having been to the San Diego WordCamp I realize how much your goal is to make blogging easy and enjoyable. From my nearly 3 years of blogging perspective you have and continue to meet your goal. I love this change. Thanks!!
Debi Walter – The Romantic Vineyard

Nodeli: We’ll consider allowing you to change the text in the future. Generally for features that use an important command name used elsewhere on WordPress.com, we don’t allow customization of the name (Post comment, Press This, or Dashboard) since the universality of the word is what makes the feature universally recognized. But we’ll keep it in mind.

Love the idea. Just checked it out on my own blog and was a little underwhelmed with its apparent insignificance. In fact, even though I knew it was there I had to look for it. Can we alter its location on the page?

We did significant experimentation with prototypes of the button, including different locations and names. The bottom right did significantly better in all of our tests, and we saw little reason to allow a different placement. For those who don’t like the feature, or find the placement annoying, they can simply turn it off, which is a reasonable tradeoff.

Mia: Any number is a good number. We believe showing the number, even if it’s small, gives visitors more confidence than not showing any number at all. Having any followers at all is something to take pride in. And I’d take 30 awesome followers over 300 lame ones. The number isn’t necessarily the most important thing.

Hey now. That was just an hour or two ago – a little patience please? 🙂 As you might imagine, we’re not slackers here – so much to do, so little time. And if you look at the comments here or on other en.blog posts, you’ll find plenty of entertaining evidence that we accept critical comments as well as positive ones.

Hi, Scott, great feature. Quick question: the Follow button sits exactly underneath a Typekit logo and I can’t seem to be able to get rid of it. Any ideas? I’d hardly noticed that it was there before. It kind of defeats the purpose since Follow can’t be moved to other parts. Let me know. Thanks

This is so awesome! It fits right in with my blog look and is always there so even when they’ve scrolled down and can’t see the follow widget, they’ll see this button. Then they don’t have to remember to go back up if they actually liked the post!

Hi Scott, Thanks for all the effort on working to get us more attention. Nifty feature and good one on naming it to Follow ! A quick question though – when u did the testing, was the Follow button as effective when we have the Fonts (typekit) enabled. I know lot of ppl use typekit, wondering if having both these buttons (especially not having similar looks) makes it more cluttered and works negatively …. anything u can share on that ?!

I wonder why WordPress isn’t giving users options as to where to place the Follow Button? “Top right corner” is the advice as to where to put a call to action on a blog or web site. So I’d really like to be able to move my new Follow option to that position.

Since this is on by default, we needed to minimize the likelyhood we’d be covering an important part of a blog’s sidebar. As you point out, many blogs already have call to actions in the upper right, and we didn’t want to compete with it.

In the future we might find a way to give more options, or to integrate the follow feature with the existing Subscribe by Email widget (which can be placed anywhere you like).

While this is all well and good, Most of us would be ecstatic if you’d find a way for us to have GFC and Networked Blog widgets that actually do something. As it stands now, I have no idea how many network blog followers I have since there’s no indication on that widget.

I like it! I am working on getting more traffic. I am now publicizing to FB and added tags and the Pin It capability. I’m at 863 views with 10 posts. I don’t know if that is good or not so good. I’d like more traffic because I am wanting to build a platform for some other writing projects I have. All ideas are welcome! Thanks, Dana

All of you are freaking geniuses and I pat myself on the back every day that I selected WordPress. Thank you for this feature and for thinking it through. Oh, one more thing: you can follow me by clicking on the small “Follow” button after my posts!

If people are more likely to follow with a button that says “follow” rather than “subscribe”, why not just change the Email Widget to say “Follow”? Why the extra button? (Don’t get me wrong – love the contstant improvements and the hardworking WordPress team – just wondering why you wouldn’t update what you already have instead of introducing something new. Is it the placement that helps as well?)

Also, I see others have asked this but it hasn’t been outrightly addressed – I would much prefer that folks don’t see how many followers I have. There’s an option to alter it in the Widget for Email subscriptions but not in the new follow button. I know it’s new – would just like to voice that I would appreciate being able to hide that as well.

Thank you very much for this added feature! I could never add the Subscribe widget on my Kubrick theme without removing all the other options on the right. This solves the problem for those who receive my emails about the latest blog post. Hopefully more will now sign up. Still haven’t figured out how to add the Follow me on Twitter button. But maybe this solves that problem more directly as well.

As other mentioned I would be interested too on customizing the text. Don’t worry, I like the “Follow” vs “Subscribe”. It’s not about that. It’s because on my blog, followers get passwords for extra articles so it would be cool to specify that for my personal follow text.

I think this is a fantastic feature, subtle & efficient but I don’t like the stats showing so I’ve disabled it. I read your answer to the other person who mentioned this but really it’s not necessary to reveal number of existing subscribers – at least there should be a choice on whether to reveal stats or not. Shame as it looks great.